Dan Smith is co-host of The Guitar Hour and author of several Lick Library DVD’s which include western swing genre licks.

Dan cut his teeth playing on cruise ships and now tours with a successful western swing band called the swing commanders where he plays electric lead guitar and lap steel slide guitar.

The package

This new 25 lick download consists of a very well shot HD video, which I’ll go into in a minute, the tabs, an explanation PDF of scales used and a great backing track that’s much better than your average 1 chord vamp.

The video

This video file is 1hr 30 minutes, really well produced and almost 3 Gigabytes of 1080p HD vid, shot at the prestigious Castle Quayle Studio (Tom Quayles spare room at his house)

It’s one long file which can be a bit of a pain looking for that lick you want to do, but its redeeming features and what makes it stand out from a lot of “lick” downloads is the attention to detail that been put into it.

Dan plays each of the lines at normal speed, then slow without the backing and if that isn’t enough then meticulously teaches all 25 lines note for note explaining in detail the way to play the lines.

The lines

There are some tricky lines here and not really for beginners, but they explained slowly and they are taught so well that anyone will be able to pick them up (eventually).

Well thought Out

I particularly like the way Dan has thought out the lines so that not only is there modulation lines following the backing track but the lines are staggered in a way that you learn every part on how to play over the backing from one line resolutions to modulation lines and everything in between.

Theory

These lines are not just average blues/mixolydian type licks but venture into the very murky world of fusion modal theory, Lydian dominant and altered stuff.

Rating

I give this an extremely high 10 /10 for content and originality

P.S If you need to know where the individual licks are in the video file